Life After Hardwick

Unless or until it is narrowed or overruled, Bowers v. Hardwick will dominate the law concerning government regulation of sexuality. In Hardwick the Supreme Court upheld as constitutional a Georgia sodomy statute that made oral or anal intercourse a felony punishable by up to twenty years in prison. The Court ended its long reluctance to assess the constitutionality of limitations on sexuality as distinct from contraception by ruling that the protected zone created by the privacy right stops short of covering private consensual sexual relations between adults. In so ruling, the Court left in place a patchwork of prohibitory laws in which identical acts are immunized or criminalized as one traverses state borders